GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA 33

was well done, and that people would find it out to be well done; but not vain of it, nor more profoundly vexed at its being found fault with, than a good saddler would be by some one’s saying his last saddle was uneasy in the seat. Not, on the whole, much molested by critics, but generally understood by the men of sense, his neighbours and friends, and permitted to have his own way with the walls he had to paint, as being, on the whole, an authority about walls; receiving at the same time a good deal of daily encouragement and comfort in the simple admiration of the populace, and in the general sense of having done good, and painted what no man could look upon without being the better for it.

18. Thus he went, a serene labourer, throughout the length and breadth of Italy. For the first ten years of his life, a shepherd; then a student, perhaps for five or six; then already in Florence, setting himself to his life’s task; and called as a master to Rome when he was only twenty.¹ There he painted the principal chapel of St. Peter’s, and worked in mosaic also; no handicrafts, that had colour or form for their objects, seeming unknown to him. Then returning to Florence, he painted Dante, about the year 1300,* the 35th year of Dante’s life, the 24th of his own;

* Lord Lindsay’s evidence on this point (Christian Art, vol. ii. p. 174) seems quite conclusive.² It is impossible to overrate the value of the work of Giotto in the Bargello, both for its own intrinsic beauty, and as being executed in this year, which is not only that in which the Divina Commedia opens, but, as I think, the culminating period in the history of the art of the Middle Ages.³

¹ [On this point, see above, p. 18 n.]

² [The reference is to the frescoes in the Chapel of the Podestà in the Bargello. The whitewash, which had concealed them, was only removed in 1841, owing to the initiative of Barone Kirkup, an English artist settled in Florence (see W. M. Rossetti’s Memoir of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1895, vol. i. pp. 64-65). Ruskin had seen the work in 1845 (see his note of that year cited in Vol. IV. p. 188 n.), and his opinion expressed there and here is entitled to the more weight because the frescoes were subsequently “restored” and repainted. The Arundel Society published a plate of the portrait of Dante from a copy made at the time by Kirkup. The case against the attribution of the work to Giotto is stated by Signor Gaetano Milanesi in his edition of Vasari (see vol. i. pp. 413 seq., 1878 edition).]

³ [Compare Vol. V. p. 37.]

XXIV. C

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